A LIGHT aircraft pilot had a miraculous escape when he was forced to make an emergency landing on a road.

Lucky Chris Hall, from Earlswood, near Solihull, walked away from the scare without a scratch after bringing his Piper Cherokee plane down on the A429 in Wellesbourne on Friday afternoon.

Amateur pilot Mr Hall, a member of the Take Flight aviation club based at Wellesbourne Mountford Airfield in Warwickshire, had been flying circuits when he got into difficulties shortly after take-off.

Remembering the words of his instructor, Chris – who was on a solo flight – searched for a field to bring the plane down safely in.

“On the climb out the engine decided that it wasn’t going to play any more,” he said.

“I remembered my instructor’s advice, which was ‘find a field’, so I did.

“I’d just been doing circuits actually, so I’d done six or seven take-offs and landings in the previous hour.

“I was very familiar with what the plane was doing and what the conditions were, which made it really easy to recover from what could have been quite a dangerous situation.”

Emergency services reached the scene near Walton Hall within minutes and were amazed to find Mr Hall had stepped out of the damaged plane without any injuries.

Paramedic Martyn Scott said: “It was more of a heavy landing than a crash.

“The pilot got up and walked away. There was not a mark on him.

“He was totally uninjured, it was incredible really.”

Police closed the road and diverted traffic along other routes as paramedics checked on Mr Hall and the plane was removed.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) will probe the incident.

Mr Hall’s emergency landing was the second air incident in the Midlands in the past month after an organ donor flight crash landed at Birmingham Airport on November 19.

The transplant liver, bound for Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, was undamaged and was saved from the burning wreckage by brave air ambulance staff who went into the plane to cut its fuel supply.

West Midlands Ambulance Service rushed the organ to the hospital where a life-saving transplant was carried out successfully.